After the Fall

"But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea."

-- Jesus, according to Matthew's Gospel

Over a period of 14 years, Father John Hanlon of St. Mary's in Plymouth, Massachusetts, would occasionally take boys under his charge to a nude beach. It was, a lawyer would later claim, the parish priest's way "to desensitize" them to their own nakedness. Hanlon, however, would subject his wards to more dissolute initiations. He sexually abused 10 of them, ranging in age from 12 to 15, including William Wood, now 27. Eleven years of shame and silence passed before Wood realized "I couldn't deal with it anymore. I was drinking and dreaming. I was totally violent. I loaded a gun and originally planned to kill him. But I was too drunk to drive. I called the police, and they took it from there." Hanlon, now 65, denied the charges, but last week a jury in Plymouth County found the priest guilty, and he was sentenced to three concurrent life terms for the rape of Wood. Said district attorney William O'Malley: "He's a pedophile who happens to be a priest. The rape of a child involves some element of betrayal of trust, whether it's a boy scout leader or a high school coach."

The harsh judgment on Hanlon is only the latest chapter in a plague of lawsuits that is bedeviling the Roman Catholic Church in America. The most famous case of sexual-abuse charges brought against a Catholic priest was dropped when the accuser of Chicago's Joseph Cardinal Bernardin admitted on Feb. 28 that he was not positive that the abuse, which he had remembered under hypnosis, had actually occurred. However, the church still faces hundreds of lawsuits around the country. Roderick MacLeish Jr., a Boston lawyer involved in civil actions against alleged child abusers, claims that of the 400 active cases handled by his firm, 250 involve clergy -- and the vast majority of them belong to the Catholic Church.

Over the last few years, the church has been forced to pay out tens of millions of dollars in fines and settlements. Meanwhile, if they are not subjects of criminal investigation, most fallen priests are sent into therapy and are either retired or dispatched to posts that do not put them into regular contact with children. "I don't believe the church should dump pedophiles out onto the street," says Bishop John Kinney, head of the Ad Hoc Committee on Sexual Abuse for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. "We have a responsibility for them. The church should be able to find some way to care for them."